Remote Monitoring Of Pv System

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Bob321

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Jul 22, 2015
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Hi

A confession - I am not an electrician but an ageing architect who grew up in the building industry (father a builder).

8 years ago I foolishly bought a dilapidated agricultural building with some land in the Spanish Pyrenees - in Catalunya close to border with Aragon. I am slowly renovating it and hope to spend half the year living there in the not too distant future.

It is situated on top of a 900m high mountain ridge and completely off-grid - I collect rainwater and currently generate electricity with a petrol generator.

I have been studying solar PV installations and understand what I need to get to make a suitable system to generate most of my electrical power. One thing is worrying me - how to monitor the system when I am not there, which can be for at least 3 months at a time.

There is no internet access but my mobile phone works fine there - I therefore need a reasonably priced add-on (to the inverter presumably) that will communicate by 3G so that I can monitor the system from my PC in the UK.

Having trawled the internet I have come up with one company, Solax (Suntellite), which has an inverter with a built-in 3G SIM card which uploads data to Xcloud.

Sounds suitable but the trail then disappears - I can't find where to buy it.

Can anyone with personal experience of this situation please help?

Thanks in anticipation.

Bob

 
wouldn't touch Solax with a barge pole. Whilst it is preferrable to monitor the inverter, you can meter with GSM cards built in which will do the same thing, just not as nicely. Failing that  dongle is a possibility?

Worth checking out SMA website or calling the technical helpline. SMA tend to have answers for pretty much anything. See below. Their inverters are definetly superior. Being at quite an altitude I would recommend fitting surge protection on AC and DC as protection against lighting strikes.

SB-WEBBOX-GSM.JPG
SMA.jpg

Sunny WebBox RJ485 / GSM
 
Thanks for such quick responses - will check out SMA website and equipment.

Although I am almost 700 miles away from the site I have friends (Dutch & Irish) who live in the adjacent valley full-time. If I monitor a fault in the system I can contact them and get them to have a look! There are also daily flights from Bristol to Barcelona and I can do door to door in 7 hours at a pinch.

Will post final solution which I adopt in due course - don't hold you breath, things happen very slowly in Spain!

Cheers

Bob

 
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